


Begging and Bartering

by crepesamillion



Category: Don't Starve (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Gorge, Angst, Gen, Human/Monster Romance, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-24 22:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16184378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crepesamillion/pseuds/crepesamillion
Summary: Wes was an expert haggler. ჯ One-shot.





	Begging and Bartering

**Author's Note:**

> I'm aware that there's inaccuracies here in terms of how the whole system worked in-game but. Wes kisses a merm in this story. That's really the only reason I wrote this at all.
> 
> Don't think about it too much. Blame my boyfriend.

The baritone rumbling of the gaping sky vibrated pines and stones and Wilson’s bones to the marrow. The ground quaked under his heels, clacking pebbles and stirring up dead leaves. The pressure of the roar piled in his ears and popped, sending white-and-silver fireworks bursting through his vision.

Vertigo overwhelmed him. The world teetered on its side. Wilson grabbed at the kettle that dangled from a rack over the waning fire. The tendons in his legs melted like wax, leaving him weak as a wet paper bag. Clutching the lip of the kettle for balance, he lowered his head and struggled for a breath.

“Wes—!” Wilson clenched his teeth to keep his guts from backing up his throat like a clogged sink drain. He swallowed until the lump behind his tonsils descended enough to let his words pass by.

Wes glanced at Wilson. Concern carved lines into his forehead and around his nose. He looked up, contemplating, but never took a pause from cutting up clods of cement-hard soil with a hoe. The sky swirled above them, jagged teeth protruding saw-edged and crooked from the boiling black clouds.

Wilson squeezed his eyes shut to keep from following Wes’s gaze. “Wes. Wes, we need more food. Vegetables. I don’t know what went wrong. We should’ve gotten a favor by now.”

Wes dug his teeth into his lip. Wilson’s panic was as infectious as the plague itself. He clutched the handle of the hoe tighter. Wood splinters scraped his chapped hands, burning as though he’d plunged his arms into a barrel of acid. A moment’s hesitation passed as he straddled a decision. Squaring his shoulders, he cast the hoe aside.

“We might not make it. It’s getting closer.” Wilson stammered with his head lowered, staring into the frothing pot. “I couldn’t have done something wrong. I did everything that was asked. Everything Mumsy said. I—”

He hacked out a cough of a startled gasp when Wes approached from behind and tucked his arms around Wilson’s middle. Supporting Wilson’s weight in his solid arms, he helped him stand upright. Wilson tilted back his head and squeezed the hem of Wes’s apron with fists that trembled.

“More food,” he said. His voice threaded on a shaky breath. “Find someone. Anyone.”

He sagged against Wes’s front, sacked with exhaustion. Reaching up, he rested his hands on Wes’s forearm, pinning it against his chest to keep Wes from stepping away.

“There’s pennies. Left pocket.” The order trailed into a sigh. Wilson rubbed the side of his head against Wes’s chest like a lonely housecat, rumpling his hair. Wes locked his arm tighter around Wilson and worked a couple fingers into his side pocket. He rummaged. Frustrated, with every second passing with the force of a clanging gong, he thrust his hand deeper.

One penny.

Wes swallowed when he pinched between his forefinger and thumb the warm plug of metal. One penny?

He held it flat on his palm. The gold disk emblazoned with a star glinted a searing white in the light that undulated from the fire. Wes stared down at it over Wilson’s head. Wilson stared too.

“That’s all I . . . ?” Wilson dug his fingers into Wes’s arm, squeezing with almost enough force to pry loose strips of meat. “What happened? I didn’t—I’m sure I didn’t—”

Wes closed his fist around the coin. He looped his other arm around Wilson to fold him closer, until Wilson’s back pressed hard and hot against his stomach. As Wilson spoke, Wes buried his nose in his shoulder, rubbing his cheek against his neck.

“Take it. Buy some— _ahh_ —buy some seeds. Tomatoes. Garlic. I don’t care. Anything they’ll give you. I’ll do what I can with this soup. Maybe there’s enough flour left to—left to . . . ”

Wilson’s bravado slipped like a mask untied. He whipped around, tearing from Wes’s grip. His apron ruffled in the breeze. With his arms still out, Wes stared, anchored in place as heavy as an anvil.

“Hurry, Wes.” The life ebbed from Wilson’s voice. It was a fragile whisper. “Do whatever it takes. Anything. This can’t be the last time.”

Wes remained bolstered where he stood. Reality struck him, sharp and real and painful as the slap of a hand across the face.

It could be the last time.

Plague crept like a green, algae-ridden tide. The heavy clouds that rolled overhead gathered weight and speed. The wind toted with it the gut-wrenching stench of rotting fish.

The thought hadn’t before rooted in Wes’s mind. He’d always taken challenges in stride. What was there to fear in a world where death was reversible? He hadn’t yet considered that perhaps plague had no cure. But the urgency in Wilson’s voice and how his red-rimmed eyes shimmered with water like fresh-poured glass made Wes all at once aware of the gravity of the situation. Wilson was terrified, and that made a sliver of panic lodge in Wes’s heart.

He squeezed the penny until the color faded from his knuckles. The wind whipped, hot and humid and suffocating. The low roar of the maw that gaped behind the clouds went dull. Wes pressed the coin into his apron pocket and fled.

Seeds, Wilson said. Seeds. What kind of seeds again? Potatoes? Onions? What grew faster? Wilson had assumed the task of trading and bartering, likely believing Wes was incapable of proper transactions. If only he still had the strength to roam the bogs and woods in search of traders.

Wes hedged at the edge of the swamp. Muck topped with a layer of purple foam like the head on a keg of beer bubbled and rolled. Hesitating, he pushed the toe of his shoe against the grime. It held. Wes drew a breath that burned in his lungs like sand and glass shards.

“Hey!”

A jolt of surprise rocketed up Wes’s backbone. He forced his weight onto his heels to keep steady. When he caught his balance, he wrenched around to look over his shoulder.

“‘Oy, lad. Looking for a paved trade route, are you?”

A ramshackle wooden cart was nestled in a cluster of ragged purple ferns. Baskets and canisters and burlap sacks weighed down the wheels, gluing them in the swamp. Leaning against the cart was a creature that looked more like the result of matrimony between fish and frog than anything. Perhaps with a splash of turtle among the clot of close kinfolk.

Wes squinted. These were the same creatures that roamed hulking and hostile back home. Home. How odd that he should think of the island as home. Compared to this, at least, it was. As far as he could remember, the merms on The Constant never spoke. 

This one was somewhere on the threshold of speaking. His words came out wet and raspy, like a phlegm-coated cough or breath spurting from slimy gills. Wes watched, smitten with curiosity. He sneaked his hand to his apron pocket to cup the penny protectively.

 “Talking to you, lad.” The merm’s eyes smoldered yellow under the brim of his newsboy cap, like the eyes of a crocodile above murky water. “If you’re trying to find a clear marked path to the grocer’s, you ain’t be getting there anytime soon.”

Wes glanced from side to side. Gathering nerves, he raised his hands, steadied his fingers, and made a motion of grasping a hoe to till the mounds of soil.

“What’s that?” The merm’s flat snout had about as much expression as a blank chalkboard. He blinked. Those yellow eyes looked like glassy marbles and just as devoid of life. “Didn’t I say? Hmf. I wonder what I was doing again . . .  oh!”

He slapped a clumsy flipper of a hand onto the edge of his cart. It rocked, creaking as it sank a little deeper into the muck. “How ‘bout a trade with Sammy? Ol’ Sammy. That’s me. I got seeds. Seeds here!”

Wes clapped his hands together, lacing his fingers. Perfect! He bounded for the cart, forgetting to carry with him any sense of abandon, and leaned over it. Heavy sacks that once had held flour now held pounds of seeds. Smaller pouches bulging with seeds filled an array of woven reed baskets. A layer of brown dust coated the bottom of the cart like a rug and clung to everything. It must have been a long time since Sammy sold a cartful.

Wes pawed through a basket, crackling seed packages. The cryptic labels identified nothing but the shape of the seeds. What had Wilson wanted again? It didn’t matter. Probably. Wes withdrew the fattest pouch of seeds and rattled it.

“Nice choice.” Sammy nodded a few times, back and forth, his head bobbing like a marionette’s on twine. “Two pence.”

Wes jolted, dropping the seed packet as if it were coated in cyanide. He dove into another basket, tugged another pouch loose, and dangled it in front of Sammy.

“What? Two pence for a pack. Every kind. Two pence.”

Wes’s heart sank like a cinderblock in cold mud. He fished into his pocket for the single penny Wilson had given him. With the most placating smile he could muster, he extended his hand.

Sammy regarded the coin in the same way he would if he were offered a pinecone for payment. He pushed his claws under his hat, scraping his scales in contemplation.

“I know times is hard, but this ain’t a charity operation. Business is business. If I cut half-price for you, every li’l stranger what runs through the swamp will expect it. I won’t have funds to keep inventory.”

Wes clutched the coin tighter with every slimy word that Sammy rasped out like cheese from a grater. Desperation flooded him and made him stumble forward to thrust the coin at Sammy yet again. Sammy put his moist hand atop Wes’s and pressed Wes’s fingers shut around the coin. His big blunt claws rested on Wes’s hand gentle as a butterfly.

“Sorry, lad. Truly am. But for sake of business in the future, I can’t go piecing off my merchandise at discount. Understandable, ain’t it?”

Understandable. Was it? Wes’s hand lowered until it dangled at his side. His fingers went slack. 

Understandable that his life hung by a fraying rope? Understandable that Wilson clung to the boiling kettle, his guts churning, sick at the thought of dying with unforgiving plague in a wasteland? Understandable that they would lose themselves to rot and decay in a swamp because they were one penny shy of a pack of dry old seeds?

The thought of falling to his knees on the ground, holding Wilson to shield him from whatever happened, made Wes’s stomach lurch and squash through his ribs.

What _would_ happen? Nobody had told them. Mumsy had been too distraught to explain anything beyond “cook.” Cook for your lives before the plague poured free. She hadn’t mentioned bartering for your lives. Were he and Wilson worth less than a penny? Bile crept hot and acrid up Wes’s throat.

Wilson was waiting for him. How could Wes approach him empty-handed? When the raging clouds had already loomed so close to the earth that they were like fog? When there was no time to plot a new plan to sate the harbinger of the plague?

How would it happen? It. Death. Would they be struck down instantly with disease, or would it slowly infect and devour them as they wandered the island aimless and hopeless?

A low huff of a breath sprayed from Sammy’s nostrils like saltwater mist. “Aw, lad. Don’t cry. Not in front of me. Tears ain’t currency; not around here, anyways.”

Don’t cry. Was he crying? Wes put his fingers to his cheeks. Wet. Sticky. He glanced at his hand. It blurred to a brown haze when his eyes flooded again.

All at once, the despair that had left no mark on him before slammed into him like a tsunami wave. His breath stuck in his throat behind a glob of snot and phlegm. His muscles liquefied, useless as pudding. The throbbing in his heart sent a pulsing shockwave through his body.

He stumbled forward against Sammy and clutched his canvas apron with all the strength he could muster. His hands quivered.

Please. _Please._ One penny short wouldn’t ruin a business. One penny short wouldn’t rob man nor merm of livelihood. Wes grasped Sammy’s apron and tugged until Sammy hastened to put his claws on Wes’s shoulders to push him back.

“Easy there, easy, now.” Sammy smoothed his claws over Wes’s shoulders. “Get ‘hold of yourself, lad. It’s not the end of the world. The plague ain’t so bad, y’know.”

Wes gazed at Sammy through the hot film of tears that varnished his eyes. Not so bad? What did he know? His soothing tone sounded nothing like Mumsy, who had bleated the end of the world since they first arrived. Not so bad . . . ?

“Really, it ain’t.” Sammy’s voice lowered until it sounded like wind wheezing through bellows. His claw brushed the side of Wes’s neck. “Could be a lot worse. Thoughts don’t come quite the same as they used to. Skin itches like you’re covered in dried tar when it scales over, and it stings a bit when the mucus starts coming all oozy through your pores. You feel sweaty and hot to the brink of suffocation for that first bit. And your hair all comes out, but—”

Wes sucked in a breath that chilled his teeth to their roots. Hair. Lose their hair? Wilson. Wilson would rather succumb to his innards rotting into jelly. The heaviness in Wes’s heart squashed his breath from his lungs.

He reached up to press his hand over Sammy’s. The meat of Sammy’s arm squished under layers of mottled scales. Like fish. Wes had gutted fish before. Wrestled them out of shallow ponds with nothing but twine and a twig and his two hands. His nose crinkled. He prodded the back of Sammy’s cold, slick hand, then trailed his fingers across the scales light as a wandering ghost.

Sammy huffed out something incomprehensible, garbled and tangled. What was that? Wes stroked his hand, back and forth, gliding his fingers over the ridges.

“‘Oy, now.” Sammy stepped back, his feet slogging in the mud. He glanced down, then back at Wes. Was that a glint in the yellow eyes? Maybe not. No. They looked as dead as ever. Wes squeezed Sammy’s hand until his heavy claws clicked, bunched together. When Sammy tensed his arm to draw it back, Wes grasped his hand to push it against his cheek.

Sticky. Cold and rubbery like the inside of an oyster.

Wes grimaced, gritting his teeth as he guided Sammy’s hand along his face. Down his jaw. The cold was almost pleasant despite the clamminess. Relieving, somehow. It alleviated the tension of a pounding headache. Wes shut his eyes.

“Err, beg your pardon, but are you all right there, lad?”

Wes watched Sammy through his lashes from the shade of his half-shut eyes. If Sammy were Wilson, he would have caught Wes’s gaze. Only for a millisecond before blanching. Then he would glance back only to look away again with cheeks blossoming so blotchy red they looked freshly slapped.

But Sammy wasn’t Wilson, and Sammy didn’t go gray beneath the scales and scum. He eased back, his claws still against Wes’s jaw, locked in place by Wes’s grip.

The instant that the gap of space opened between them, Wes took a surging step closer to fill it. The mud sucked at his shoes, plastering them solid as tree roots. Wes stumbled. His knees buckled, and he made a flailing grab at Sammy’s apron to hold himself upright. Sammy’s bulk kept him anchored, but surprise made him grapple with Wes to plant his heels in the mud.

With his claws around Wes’s wrists, he stared. Those big eyes never blinked. No emotion. Wes stared back. His reflection was just a smear of brown and black in the gooey eyes. It was as if Sammy saw through him, watching how the reeds and cattails behind him rippled in the wind.

Wes’s windpipe went taut. He swallowed. His fingers curled tighter around the apron. Desperation surged through him, setting his nerves ablaze and making his hands shake. Fear mingled with the panic.

Everything around him went still. 

Wes’s heart lurched when a pressing sensation of weight sank upon him. Air pressure. He glanced up at the same time Sammy did. Through the tangled black tree limbs, red light filtered through in blades. The glow lit up the swamp, bathing every fern and vine and rotting log in eerie red.

The rumbling stopped. Wes pressed closer to Sammy. This time, Sammy let him.

“Running out of time, you lot are.” He patted Wes’s back in slow, rhythmic thumps. “It won’t be so hard. Once the plague hits and the storm is over, we’ll be able to get to know each other better. Things stay quiet here in these corners of the swamp. Have you met Pip yet?”

Sammy droned on. He gave the impression of one half-asleep. Slow, slow, slow. What was he talking about? Calm. Wes’s thoughts rolled like the big black clouds. How could he stay calm?

He squished his cheek against Sammy’s barrel of a chest. The heartbeat throbbed, vibrating his skull. Slow. Slow. Thump. It was an echo of each pat Sammy gave to his back. Thump. Thump.

What was Wilson doing? Scavenging for something, anything to appease the glutton of the island? Waiting for Wes to return? Or had he given up already?

Given up. Nausea sacked him with all the force of knuckles to the gut. One penny stood between him and Wilson. Time hadn’t run out yet.

 _Do anything it takes._ Wilson’s words echoed in his head like in an empty corridor. His ears rang, high and tinny. Anything.

Determination spurned him, sharp as a poison-coated dart. He vaulted on tiptoe, mud squelching in ridges around his shoes, and clapped his hands against Sammy’s face. The scales grated against his palms like carpetburn. He held his breath. Stars swirled in his vision. He screwed his eyes shut, locked his elbows, and snapped Sammy’s head forward. He opened his mouth just in time to catch Sammy’s when he yelped.

Fish. He tasted like fish.

Sammy froze solid as a boulder. Wes tilted his head to seal his lips against Sammy’s mouth. He twisted the rubbery fins between his fingers, back and forth.

Fish.

Slick. Cold. Salty.

Wes’s face contorted in a grimace. He moved his hands to slide them from the fins and toward the back of Sammy’s head. He pushed closer. The tang of salt burned his chapped lips, throbbing, setting his whole face ablaze with shimmers of hot wavering pain. He pressed forward, every muscle quivering with intensity. Sweat stung his forehead and rolled down his nose, mingling with the stringy muck that slobbered from Sammy’s face.

Sammy complied with every motion, no more defiant than a ragdoll. Wes’s heart clenched. He eased back. His lips left Sammy’s snout with a quiet, wet smack. Slow and lazy, as if sorting through the cottonfield of fantasy, his hands drifted down to Sammy’s apron strings.

Sammy’s stare was like that of a taxidermied beast. Glassy. Deep. He tilted his head. The spines in his long fins went stiff like quills. He blinked once. Twice. Some of the fog faded from his eyes. His gaze moved. It trailed down Wes’s body and lingered, as though he saw Wes for the first time.

Wes held his breath, keeping his teeth gritted tight. Why didn’t Sammy say something? He squeezed the apron strings. Say _something._ Anything . . . .

Nothing.

Wes slumped forward. His forehead pressed against Sammy’s chest. He gripped the apron strings so tightly that his hands quivered. No. No. His last chance couldn’t have dissipated into the air like a wisp of smoke. Why didn’t his pleading work?

Silence dragged. The distant rumbling deepened. Birds exploded from the trees in a flurry of caws and squawks, shedding feathers as they blurred into black boomerang silhouettes against the red clouds.

The racket jolted Sammy from his daze. As if waking from sleep and peaceful dreams only to find himself lost in the world, he took a step back. His gaze trailed slow as cold molasses from left to right. It crept back to Wes even slower, and finally focused.

“Oh—beg your pardon there, lad. Er, how long have you been here?”

A set of knuckles to the gut wouldn’t have caught Wes any more off-guard. His stomach twisted into a Gordian knot. This was what he had wasted his time on. His time—no, his _and_ Wilson’s. Their time. Seconds scattered away like those startled birds.

Wes glanced up. Sammy blurred into a gray-green smear. It didn’t matter if Sammy saw him cry. Let him.

“I can’t seem to get my thoughts together lately.” Sammy muttered more to himself than anyone else. Had he already forgotten that Wes stood before him? “I just don’t know where—oh!”

In a rush of excitement, he slogged to his cart again and grasped the handles. The cart bounced a bit in the mud.

“‘Oy, stranger.” Sammy waved in a wide arc to give a grandiose gesture to his laden cart. “I’m not sure where you’re headed, but you look like you could use some supplies. I got seeds. Seeds here!”

Wes swallowed the lump that felt like a cactus wedged in his throat. He nodded.

Sammy leaned into the cart, plucking packs of seeds from their baskets. “Blue, round, pointy. What’s that say? Ob-long. I got oblong seeds, right here.”

It didn’t really matter now.

Sammy glanced at Wes. For a fleeting moment, his eyes cleared. His grip on the seed packet went slack. His claws twitched, then curled around the packet with enough force to crush it. He didn’t notice when some of the seeds dropped through the popped seam and sprinkled over the ground.

“You there. There’s something . . . er, what might I say . . . familiar about you, lad. You wouldn’t happen to be one of those, hm, gatekeepers that ol’ Mumsy talks of, would you?”

Wes squinted. How was he supposed to know? He never understood what the nanny blathered about. What was a gatekeeper, anyway?

“I feel like there’s something about you.” Sammy’s voice muffled when he dug deeper into the cart. “I don’t know why I get such a feeling, but I’ll tell you what. These seeds, I tends to piece ‘em off at two pence. But for you, I’ll give ‘em to you for a penny.”

Wes went stiff as a fencepost. A penny. One penny. Did Sammy really—? He held his breath. His heart jolted into a gallop against his ribs.

Sammy shook his head, somber as a hoary old sage. “Half-price. Don’t tell anyone I’ve given you the cut though, will you, lad?”

Wes wasn’t sure if he managed to nod. Sammy took the fattest pack of seeds from the basket and pressed it into Wes’s hand. The paper crackled. Sammy’s hand stayed on Wes’s.

When Wes looked up, Sammy's face was different. The eyes were still dead as golf balls plugged into the sockets. But this time, one half of his gaping mouth bent upwards and teeth jutted. It was the closest thing to a smile Wes had seen from him. Maybe Sammy understood after all.

“Thanks for your business, stranger.” The jagged teeth glinted under the coat of algae when Sammy dipped his head in a nod. The leather newsboy cap slipped askew. “A real pleasure it was. Hope to see you around here again sometime.”

Nothing had ever been so comforting as the weight of the seed packet in Wes’s hand. A welt rose in his throat. His hand shook. Carats of ruby had no greater worth than these dry little seeds in the stiff leather pouch.

He gripped the pouch as though it were a lifeline and pressed it to his chest. In this moment, no one in the world was as awe-inducingly, heart-meltingly, breathtakingly _beautiful_ as that of the hunchbacked merm in a stained yellow apron. Under the layers of gray-green slime and gritty mud and mucous, that soul sparkled like a sterling silver teapot.

Impulse flooded Wes like a current from live wires. Tripping through the globs of mud, he tossed out his arms as if diving through tape at a finish line and plowed into Sammy’s front. Sammy swayed like an old oak tree. Wes folded his arms around Sammy’s wrinkled neck and pressed his face against the wet gills.

 _Thank you. Thank you._ He buried his face in Sammy’s neck. _Thank you._

Everything was going to be okay.

“There, now,” Sammy said, a puff of a laugh whooshing in his coarse voice. “Really. Pleasure is mine.”

Wes unlocked his arms from around Sammy’s neck. The rough scales scraped at his skin. Minus the weight of one penny and the dread of the future, his heart was as light as a balloon sailing into springtime clouds. He let his heels sink into the mud again, sliding his hands down the front of Sammy’s apron.

“Best of luck to you, lad.” Sammy put his big hand atop Wes’s for a reassuring pat. “Come back now, y’hear?”

Come back—? He hoped not. He wouldn’t make any promises. He squeezed the seed packet, his cheeks aching with a giddy grin. Okay. Everything was going to be okay.

He plunged through the thicket of weeds that hemmed in the swamp, sloshing his way past. The instant his feet hit solid earth and grass, he sprinted. The hot, sour wind played with his hair and stung his face. A sliver of light stabbed through the boiling red clouds.

He clutched the pouch of seeds more tightly.

Everything was going to be okay.

After all—Wes was an expert haggler.

 


End file.
